Online games are really profitable. They’re not as trendy as they
were a few years ago, and there have been some very high profile failures, but
still they are very, very profitable.

Slide 4

They are that way for one simple reason - people pay
to continue playing. Sometimes through subscriptions, more often lately through
free to play, which means micro transactions,

Slide 5

which means
the guy killing you with a sword made out of sentient radioactive meat paid for
your being there to be killed. With a glowing meat sword.

Slide 6

But when you have people paying every month for the
privilege of killing other people with intelligent scimitars made of ham, you
no longer have the luxury of making a great game and handing it to someone, and
saying “Here. I give this, the boon of my efforts, to you.”

Slide 7

Instead, you have a customer, and a customer who has a
monthly expectation of things that you deliver in return for his money, or his
being so kind as to be killed by a wealthy patron that gives you, the
developer, money for his giant sword of meat.

Slide 8

And one key problem is that online games tend to be a
closed loop. After the initial explosion of NEW! SHINY!,
it’s
really hard, and really expensive, to find new customers to replace the ones
you lose.

Slide 9

And you will lose customers. You’ll lose a lot of customers.

Slide 10

Some people won’t want to ever give you money, simply because telling
the Internet your credit card number is not always a good idea.

Slide 11

Some people simply won’t like your game at all
and stop playing.

Slide 12

On one game I worked on, our metrics determined that
some customers purchased the game in a store (this was how you bought games
back in the dark ages), set up an account to play the game, installed it,
logged in at least once,

Slide 13

got to the
character creation screen, and said… NOPE. And never got any further. Ever.

Slide 14

But getting new customers to replace the ones you lose
is expensive. So the key directive for live teams in online games becomes
retention. The prevailing wisdom is that retention is the most cost-effective
way of keeping a healthy customer base. Don’t lose people! Keep them as long as possible!

Slide 15

But here’s the thing. People play online games for years.
YEARS. There are people still playing Ultima Online
that were when it launched. They have been playing the same game for over 15
years.

Slide 16

Someone played the same game of Civilization II for 10
years and it turned into a, and I quote, a “hellish nightmare of suffering and devastation, where
the polar ice caps have melted more than 20 years due to global warming, dozens
of nuclear wars have rendered much of the world uninhabitable, and endless
warfare makes it impossible to rebuild”. And that was after 10 years.

Slide 17

People have been playing Ultima
Online for over 15 years.

Slide 18

And after you play a game for years, you get tired of
it. That’s
normal. That’s
expected. You have gotten a lot of return for your investment. You’ve conquered the
commanding heights of the game (because it’s assured that you do, because the secret of success
of online games is that it is a simple trade of investment in time for tangible
reward). And… you’re done.

Slide 19

And it’s hard for some people to admit that they’re done, after years and
years, and it’s even more hard for online game developers to admit that, hey,
maybe it’s OK to
let people go. Because when people don’t want to admit that they’re done, they’re BITTER.

Slide 20

They grief other players in the game out of boredom,
because they’ve DONE
everything else. They’ve gone
through all your content, and you can’t make more because most of the team got laid off in
cutbacks last year.

Slide 21

They post angry articles on your message board,
because they KNOW they know the game better than the developers do. And they
usually do. Lord knows they’ve spent more time in the game.

Slide 22

What makes them so bitter is that they WANT to keep
playing. They want the game to last forever. They aren’t there for the game any more, though they most of the time won’t want to admit it, or
even really know how. They’re there for the social connections that they’ve made, the raid nights
and the guild

Slide 23

chat and
the time when they all met at a bar in Chicago and did you know RolfSlaughter and AngerManagementIssues
got engaged last month after Rolf found out Anger was actually a twenty
something young woman that time on voice chat last year? If you can’t keep them playing and
happy, you are responsible for a failed marriage. Well, most likely several
thousand but still.

Slide 24

Remember, people are still playing UO 15 years later,
along with many other decade-old games. They do it because they still enjoy it.
Because at this point it’s no
longer the developer’s
experience, it’s their
experience. It’s the
simple joy of the friendships they’ve made, the social compact they’ve formed

Slide 25

the fun
that comes from when you buy a cat $100 worth of toys and she plays with the
box instead.

It’s OK if the cat plays with the box. It’s OK if players find
their own fun.

Slide 26

And they really resent it when that fun train leaves
the station, almost always because the guild broke up over the four other guys
who had a crush on AngerManagementIssues, and when
that stops the player is left with the actual game that they got bored with two
years ago.

Slide 27

And they’re not happy. But they’re paying you for that
actual game. That they don’t really want, any more.

Slide 28

At this point, this is where we tend to fail our
customers. We don’t have
a GAME OVER screen, because why would we? We like money!

Slide 29

We don’t have an exit strategy for when people are simply
done playing. We don’t know
how to let people go. We have made vague stabs at trying to increase retention
through making guilds attractive, and all that does is make it so guilds have a
reason to invite thousands of members at random and make them useless as social
compacts.

Slide 30

We really don’t understand the whole cats playing with a box thing.
We’re used
to telling stories and making really nifty experiences, and we aren’t comfortable with
stepping back and saying “we’re done. And maybe at
this point you’re
done, too."

Slide 31

But at this point I would ask, why are
you really here.

Slide 32

Are you here to just make a lot money? (There are
easier ways)

Slide 33

Or are you here because game development is one of the
most unique forms of crafting entertainment that exists, and because you want
to share that entertainment, that joy, with people.

Slide 34

My simple heresy that I would like to propose for
online game development is this: we should be comfortable with customers
leaving. For the right reasons, not because we messed up a patch and destroyed
all their characters, but because they’ve played the game, they’ve had fun, and they’re done, and ready for
our next game. If you believe in what you do, and why you do, it’s not only destructive to
your game’s
bottom line, but simply wrong to keep them longer than they want to – than they should be
there. There’s a lot
of details in *how* this would happen, but for now, I just want to plant this
small spark.